


The Preservation of the World

by StripySock



Category: Ginger Snaps (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Codependency, F/F, Hair Brushing, Post-Canon, Sister/Sister Incest, Thoreau-Lite, living in the woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:53:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26301484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: “I went to the woods to live deliberately,” she shouts at Ginger’s back, clad in a red puffer jacket to avoid being mistaken for a target. The irony is not lost on Brigitte.Ginger turns round, looking completely unimpressed. “You did not,” she says, hair tucked into the back of her coat, too-pale face peeking out.“No,” Brigitte admits. “I did not. I went to the woods because otherwise you were going to end up in a lab, on your hind legs begging for a biscuit.”
Relationships: Brigitte Fitzgerald/Ginger Fitzgerald
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39
Collections: RelationShipping 2020





	The Preservation of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [patrick_hotstetter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrick_hotstetter/gifts).



> Title borrowed from Thoreau with thanks - Wilderness is the Preservation of the World
> 
> Many thanks to [A] for assistance - all mistakes that remain are entirely my own.

Their mother used to have these little books of quotations that she’d keep in her oversized handbag and bring out at inopportune moments. Stupid shit: The Little Book of Calm. 101 Spiritual Hands. Nature and You: A Love Story. Ginger had once unkindly and accurately said that the quotes substituted for a personality, running words of wisdom through a capitalist wringer. Brigitte used to steal the books and lie upside down on Ginger’s bed and make her laugh by reading them out.

One of the quotes comes back to her now, as the sun dims on their way back. “I went to the woods to live deliberately,” she shouts at Ginger’s back, clad in a red puffer jacket to avoid being mistaken for a target. The irony is not lost on Brigitte.

Ginger turns round, looking completely unimpressed. “You did not,” she says, hair tucked into the back of her coat, too-pale face peeking out. 

“No,” Brigitte admits. “I did not. I went to the woods because otherwise you were going to end up in a lab, on your hind legs begging for a biscuit.” 

“You love it,” Ginger says, shifts the shopping bags she’s holding from one hand to another. One of them’s a plastic TJ Maxx bag and even from here, Brigitte can see the heaviness of it, the bulge of meat. “Any excuse to wade through birdshit. Pick bluebells. Spring fucks a National Forest and boom, Nature with a capital N. C’mon Brige, admit it. This is your smelly little heaven.”

“You’re a psycho,” Brigitte says, no heat to her words, and she starts to trudge forward. Ginger waits for her to catch up, it’s not easy to walk side by side with the gaps between the trees so narrow, but they manage it, ducking between trees in their matching jackets. Ginger hadn’t liked them, but at fifteen bucks apiece in a closing down sale, Brigitte didn’t give a shit. Warmth and warning and the pockets were deep enough to hold a decent-sized syringe should they ever need to.

Back at what passes for a house, a couple of rooms in just enough repair to keep the rain off their heads, Ginger unloads their purchases. She leaves the TJ Maxx bag under the table, her version of discreet. Really, she can eat for a month off what she finds in the woods, brings down with lethal precision, but she usually doesn’t. Tonight, Ginger will cook steaks, rare, rarer than Brigitte is used to. Their mother had believed the greyer the steak, the closer to God. 

If they’d given up and taken Ginger to the men in white coats, maybe they’d know why the syringe had effected a full cure on Brigitte, leaving her with nothing more than an appetite for rare steak, and hadn’t for Ginger. Cured her just enough to become human again, not enough to keep her that way month-on-month. As it is, it’s just Brigitte with a bunch of out-of-date library books and fucked up theories, speculating on a whole bunch of _whys_ including why Ginger in wolf form or not didn’t seem to find her a threat, or at least not threatening enough to eat. 

They’ve spent most of spring here, all of summer, and it’s been liveable in the barest bones sense of the word. Past midsummer, as the days grew shorter again, Brigitte occasionally thought of the winter and shivered. She’d bargained on finding a solution before then, but the days were speeding by. They don’t have running water or electricity - there’s a reason why they buy Wonderbread, Little Debbies finest offerings, everything packaged bar the meat, multivitamins to avoid scurvy - Brigitte had read somewhere that fresh meat should be enough to avert scurvy, but she’s not risking it. It’s harsh and bare, and basic and Brigitte doesn’t care, because it’s keeping Ginger alive.

Ginger who is currently frying steaks over a camp stove, hair scrunched up on top of her head out of the way, long enough to hang down her back otherwise. They’re both clean and for once it didn’t involve a brook and water cold enough to choke the gasp in the throat. If Brigitte leans in a little, underneath the sizzle of meat, she’d be able to smell the freshness of store-brought shampoo. She holds herself back, clutches her hands around the opposite elbows, like she’s cradling the impulse.

By the time she’s put out two plates and sloshed off-brand cola into a couple of glasses, the steaks are done, and Ginger’s flopped down on the other side of the table, curls her feet around Brigitte’s leg. Brigitte shifts a little in her seat, unwanted zip of excitement down her spine and _fuck puberty, fuck her body, fuck everything._ Twirls an onion around her fork, only half-cooked, still almost raw since it was thrown in the pan at the same time as the steak. “Stop humping my leg with your feet bitch,” she says.

Ginger shovels in a knifeful of steak and doesn’t move her feet, clamps on a little tighter if anything. “‘M not humping you,” she says through it. “I’m a were _wolf_ , not a weredog.” Her toes are warm against Brigitte’s leg, even through the fluffy socks. Ginger runs so hot these days, a comfort on cold nights, her leg flung over Brigitte, alien strength holding her close even in her sleep, hair suffocating them both. 

“Could’ve fooled me,” Brigitte says. She knows more than she’s ever wanted to know about wolves by this point. Knows the exact pressure a wolf’s teeth can bring to bear per square inch and that they run on their toes. She thinks of the first one when she watches Ginger bite into her steak.

Ginger wiggles again, scraping her foot against Brigitte’s leg through her jeans. “If I was a weredog,” she says, entirely reasonably. “We could like, enter me for show competitions. Instead of well, this.” The jerk of her head takes in most of the room and all of their situation.

“If you were a weredog,” Brigitte says, “you would be a mutt. You have to be like, Kennel Club for competitions.” To forestall the inevitable argument about what dog breed Ginger would be, if she wasn’t a rabid killing machine who could only be tamed by wolfsbane once a month, she pours them both a little more coke. 

After dinner, Ginger piles up the plates to take to the creek the next morning and gives the floor a rudimentary brush, Brigitte straightens the room, lines the cans up neatly. Housekeeping becomes exceptionally easy when you live in two rooms and own nearly nothing. Everything they do own is stolen, or bought with stolen money. “Feng shui,” Brigitte says out loud.

“Bless you,” Ginger responds, throws herself back onto the broken down sofa that Brigitte has covered with first a sheet, then a blanket. “Fuck, there were thirteenth century peasants who had more of a life than we do.” There’s a restlessness in her that Brigitte’s learnt to recognize and redirect. She’d love to say it was some sort of wolfy thing, but it’s just from having known Ginger her entire life. This is the kind of mood that makes Ginger burn books in the backyard, just for something to do.

Brigitte sits down beside Ginger, nudges her along a little bit. Ginger doesn’t really move, slumps on Brigitte’s shoulder, breath hot and damp through her t-shirt. It’s cold enough in the woods that even during the summer nights, Brigitte’s skin goosepimples up. It’s definitely the cold. Ginger nudges a little closer, pressed thigh to thigh. Brigitte tries to think of something they can do that doesn’t involve cards, books or the other meagre activities that fill the evenings that Ginger doesn’t spend bounding through the undergrowth, but her mind is slow and heavy tonight. 

She’s thinking too much about the fact that Ginger is putting some sort of move on her, has her arm casually thrown over Brigitte’s shoulders, face pressed into her neck. She knows how this works, Pretty in Pink had it down pat, the bits that she’d seen anyway between her and Ginger throwing popcorn at the screen and mocking the hell out of it. Fuck.

When Brigitte stands, Ginger practically slumps over onto the empty bit of the sofa. “Bed,” Brigitte says, squeaky high because her voice is a betrayer, God, everything about her fucking body is a betrayal. And bed? “I’m tired,” she says, brings it back down to a normal pitch, looks away towards the other room. “Take your time, OK.”

Life is a dick and Ginger is a bigger dick because she’s up like greased lightning and one step ahead, pushing down her jeans as she goes, flash of faded blue underwear as she makes it into the next room while she claws her jeans off with her feet. Brigitte wants her just to be claiming the best side of the bed, not, not whatever this is, whether it’s Maury or Share and Care with the Fitzgerald Sisters on Channel 515, pay ten dollars to unscramble. She’s half right, Ginger is on the bed, but she’s sitting cross legged on the covers, lit by the one stupid lamp they have in this room. This, Brigitte thinks a little hysterically, is not the expensive kind of porn. 

Ginger is not subtle and neither is Brigitte. They are in fact both separately and together about as subtle as a hole in the head or a set of death photos shown to a disbelieving normie class. So Brigitte doesn’t bother trying to beat around the bush. “People don’t do this Ginger. Like not even us. This is not normal.”

“It’s not exactly a sound excuse anymore is it? Being human.” Ginger says. Brigitte can tell she’s trying to be slick about it, like she really doesn’t care. It doesn’t work. If Ginger really didn’t care, she wouldn’t have said anything about it at all. She’d have shrugged it off, like she did everything else she outgrew - coats, birthday cakes with the pink icing, humanity. “We’re not people, Brigitte. We’re not. We’re the fucking Fitzgeralds.”

Ginger isn’t exactly wrong. She’s actually about 60% right. Just right enough to pass senior year, not enough to get into college. Brigitte is still a person, while Ginger mostly isn’t. She looks like one, but deep down on a molecular level she isn’t. 

Brigitte doesn’t say that; she isn’t a total bitch no matter what Ginger likes to say. Like always when she’s freaked, her hand creeps to her hair to nervously stroke through it, is halted by the inevitable tangles. She can’t remember the last time she combed it - that’s something that belongs to the time before. “Even if we’re the fucking Fitzgeralds Ginge, we don’t need to be the Fitzgeralds who _fuck._ Like what the hell?”

Ginger is fumbling through one of the bags of stuff she’d brought back from her latest sortie into town and brandishes a comb. “Sit down,” - she looks ridiculous gesturing with it, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that she’s serious. Brigitte sits down on the bed more or less automatically, this bit she knows. This bit they’ve always done. Even when they were kids, Ginger did this for them both. Ginger’s fingers are nimbler than hers, she knows exactly how to tease out the strands. Ginger is not like their mother who with the best intentions in the world, had never understood how not to yank. 

Ginger separates out a hank of Brigitte’s hair and works her fingers through it, little jolts of pain against Brigitte’s scalp, other hand holding the lock close to the base so it doesn’t pull too much. When Ginger’s satisfied with her first pass, she takes the comb out of her mouth and starts the first draw of it through the hair. It’s a comfort, or it should be. 

Brigitte is the first one to return to the subject, now that Ginger’s mentioned it. It’s like she’s finally exposed a rotting tooth that Brigitte’s been niggling against for weeks now, wobbling back and forth in her mouth until she can decide whether to knock it loose and just take the pain. “We can’t,” Brigitte says, but her voice lacks conviction. Inside herself, it’s like something’s moving quietly into place, and it makes her heart pound, her throat heavy. She can’t hold out forever, she wants this too much. Her only chance to save them both, is to pretend that she doesn’t. 

Ginger, who prances about the place in her more manic moments declaring herself an apex predator, holding up her spoils: a little limp rabbit, a fat wallet from a man in a car, leaps onto that little hint of weakness. “Can’t,” she says. “Or _shouldn’t._ You’re such a fucking dork sometimes Brige. What do their rules matter to us?”

There’re fingers in Brigitte’s hair, pulling it just a little, the warmth of Ginger’s touch as she tugs at her hair, spreading along her scalp and down her back until it sits in the base of her spine, makes her feel heavy and floaty all at the same time, like she can’t move her legs properly. There’s a little patch of skin just behind her ear and Ginger’s touching it, sliding down until her fingers are resting against Brigitte’s pulse which is going wild even to her own senses. She wonders what it feels like to Ginger. 

Ginger’s kneeling behind her, leaning close, a more than human warmth exuding from her where she presses against the line of Brigitte’s back. Her hand has slipped down to span Brigitte’s neck, her fingers against the pulse that beats frantically, her thumb against the back of Brigitte’s neck, her other hand wound into Brigitte’s hair, tugging it back so that Brigitte’s tilted into Ginger’s touch. She’s close enough, that Brigitte can feel the faintly sweet puff of her breath against her cheek. “Come on,” Ginger whispers, and the sound of it makes Brigitte shiver somewhere deep inside, sharp dart of a sensation she can’t name, running down her shoulder blades. 

Maybe it’s fear. 

“You’ve been running half your life from this, Brigitte,” Ginger says. “Think I don’t remember the way you touched me before, the way you look at me when you think I’m not looking. I don’t need eyes to see it.” She takes a long, elaborate inhale of Brigitte’s hair, though as Brigitte knows, it just smells of cheap CVS shampoo, maybe a little of earth. “I can smell that you’re wet,” she says, deep and intimate, mouth close enough to Brigitte’s cheek that she could almost kiss it.

Brigitte tugs away, ignoring the pain. “You can’t smell anything,” she says, bright and hard, brittle to her ears, but hopefully not to Ginger’s. “You’ve got a cold. Are you going to finish or not?” Brigitte is, to her own utter mortification, wet, not unexpectedly, but she clamps her knees together firmly anyway. There’s no need for Ginger to know that.

Ginger’s still behind her for a second, tension coiled. Brigitte braces herself, clamps down hard on the urge to soften her retort. She doesn’t know what she wants Ginger to do - maybe to throw down her comb, to go out into the woods and fight the fucking moon, to go into town and screw some stranger until Ginger realizes that she doesn’t want this. Not like Brigitte does, not in the same way. The monster that Ginger is, is in her blood. Brigitte is something else entirely, didn’t need to be bitten for this sickness to lodge itself inside her. 

“You,” Ginger says. “You are such a little bitch. You know that right?” But her fingers are gentle in Brigitte’s hair now, and she’s curving a little away, separating out the next bit of hair with her fingers, and Brigitte no longer has to worry about whether Ginger, newly adept at sensing heart rates, can read her pulse enough to know that she’s lying.

They fall into the same rhythm as they always have done in the past, Ginger combs out a lock of hair, pulls it to one side and Brigitte holds the ends so they don’t get tangled up again. Inside, she’s still shaking from the nearness, the closeness of Ginger, biting her lips just enough to dent the skin and remind herself of pain, not enough to break the skin and test the limits of Ginger’s current nose blindness. 

Ginger shifts closer again. “Do you remember before?” she says, quieter. 

Brigitte manages not to say the obvious. “Yeah,” she says softly instead. “Yeah, I remember.” 

“We were never normal,” Ginger says, and the conviction in her voice is absolute. “Never.” It’s nothing she hasn’t said before, since she turned ten, Ginger has sung a familiar song of isolation, of the two of them against the world. “This was coming down the line,” she says, and this bit is new. “Why are you fighting it? Is it because I’m a monster,” and her voice wobbles just a little, dips down like she might cry and what Brigitte feels at that moment is unexpected.

“Now who's a bitch,” Brigitte says, and she wants to laugh and cry at the same time, against the calculated manipulation in Ginger’s voice, the way it wavers on the last word, drops like she oh just can’t bear it. It kind of works despite itself, there’s a bit of Brigitte that’s tuned to Ginger’s pain, even when that pain is half-faked. “You can’t get me like that Ginge, I know you inside out. Like you think I want this, kind of believe you do. But you just can’t stand the thought that I’ll leave, think you have to do this to make me stay.”

Brigitte turns around, pulling her hair out of Ginger’s loose grasp. It takes every bit of miserable bravery that she can muster to do it, but she needs to see Ginger’s face when she says this. Ginger used to love annoying Brigitte when they were kids by leaving her fingers a half centimetre away from Brigitte’s face and chanting, “I’m not touching you.” This is like that, but meaner. 

Ginger has her head tilted just a little bit, holds the comb between them like a weapon. Kind of reminds Brigitte of herself, holding a needle as a final weapon of last defence. Brigitte gently takes it out of her hands. “I’m not leaving,” she says, flatly, baldly, gets it out there between them, takes down the wall that Ginger’s been running her head against, the idea that Brigitte could have some kind of life outside of these woods without Ginger, that one day she might pick up her things and depart for the normality of suburbia. It’s the world’s stupidest idea for a whole bunch of reasons. “You know I think we need to keep looking, for a full cure - monkshood isn’t enough, and I know you think that we should just let the world burn and screw them all. But that doesn’t mean I’m leaving you.”

“Actually,” Ginger says thoughtfully. “I mean what _I_ think we should probably do from a moral point of view is off me.” 

Brigitte doesn’t dignify that with a response. “I’m not going,” she says again, and this time it looks like Ginger believes that, the tension around her mouth softened. “Like if I can forgive you for having the world’s worst time of the month, and you can forgive me for being a total weirdo with a crush on my own sister, and then I get to do some more forgiving for you trying to use that against me, I think we can do this.” It’s a relief to say it, to knock out the tooth and drain the poison, even as Brigitte can feel herself flush red across her face.

Brigitte only feels Ginger’s hands on her for a second, before with an unnatural strength, Ginger’s thrown her onto the bed, crawled up to straddle her hips. “You think I was joking,” Ginger says, no anger in her voice, just something like disbelief. “That I’d fuck you just to keep you from leaving? I mean that was a cute speech and my heart grew like three sizes hearing it, but I wasn’t trying to make you stay, I was trying to give you a reason not to want to leave. It’s different.”

Brigitte sort of sees what Ginger means, but this isn’t something they can’t be 100% sure on. “When?” she says, crosses the fingers of both hands. 

Ginger shrugs. “I don’t remember not loving you,” she says, no shame, just as though it’s some sort of incontrovertible truth. “Like I didn’t want to bone you until this started, but what’s that got to do with it? I didn’t want to bone _anyone_ before this. Like maybe it’s the wolf and maybe it’s good old fashioned hormones.”

“Yeah,” Brigitte says, a little dazed.

Ginger leans a little closer and Brigitte is aware of the heat and weight of Ginger against her thighs, the shifting ever present _liveness_ of her. "Do you care?" Ginger whispers, close enough that Brigitte can feel the movement of her breath. It's Brigitte's turn to get her fingers into Ginger's hair, rough against her fingers after months of being washed in cold water creeks, and to pull Ginger down that final inch against her.

Brigitte doesn’t know. She doesn't know how to do any of this. She's _thought_ about it, of course she has, she's a teen, sometimes she can't think about anything else. She's grown up around Ginger, like some sort of twin tree, until sometimes at night, she can't tell where which of them ends and which of them begins, but it doesn't make this any easier. Ginger is kissing her, nudging her mouth against Brigitte's slowly, like she just wants to drag their lips together, hot and dry, catching together and dragging away. Swipes her tongue, quick and light against her own bottom lip, as though to make the slide of them together smooth, one arm bracketing Brigitte's head, the fall of her hair to one side, loosened from it's upknot. Ginger's just smudging kisses over her mouth, quick and light, and Brigitte can feel herself quaking, wants, needs more. There's a shiver in her bones, and it's running down her spine, snapping her hips upward just a little, pulling her leg out to the side so Ginger can settle closer on top of her.

Maybe it's the same bit of Brigitte that likes her steak closer to the cow than the fire, the part of her that draws Ginger's heat nearer at night, some subtle instinct in her, not wolf, not human, that acts on feeling, rakes her hand through Ginger's hair and holds her closer, opens her mouth so Ginger can take her bottom lip between those dangerous teeth and suck at it, the hint of them, the scrape of them against the soft tender flesh. There's this pit in Brigitte's stomach, getting bigger and bigger until it feels like it'll suck the whole of her into it, the uneasy rumble of desire mixed with fear. It's a proper kiss now, Ginger pressing in with her tongue, before retreating and kissing her again, light and shallow, until it's Brigitte pushing back, Brigitte who is desperate, begging for Ginger to do something, anything.

Ginger seems to read her mind, sits back on Brigitte's hips, sweeps her hair to one side and lifts off her t-shirt. She's not wearing a bra underneath, breasts pale and nipples hard and pink, no shame about her, nothing Brigitte hasn't seen before, just not like this. There's a little scar around her bellybutton, remnant of a silver ring that didn't take, and Brigitte's eyes go there automatically. She's not used to seeing Ginger not heal, not used to being able to trace her fingers over the softness of it, not like this. Ginger's watching her and when she sees she's finally got Brigitte's attention back on her face, she pulls her hair back a little away from her neck, arches her back, like she's demanding admiration. 

"You're such an attention whore," Brigitte says, but it comes out entirely too soft and Ginger's smile is vicious, victorious, her legs like iron bars around Brigitte's waist, holding her in place, like she's Ginger's little don't-chew toy. 

_Fuck that._ Brigitte can't twist Ginger off, but she can do one better, she has her hands free, and it takes about three seconds to slide one of them between Ginger's legs and press up against Ginger's cunt, to feel the dampness of her underwear, the way she moves against Brigitte's hand automatically, the high shocked gasp she lets out, as though she's surprised. Lets her fingers curl underneath the fabric, a statement of intent as strong as Brigitte can make, even if the touch isn't doing much. Watches Ginger's smile fall off her face, the familiar intentness of her eyes on Brigitte's face, as she leans forward, grinds against Brigitte's hand. "Come on," Ginger says, soft and slow. "Let's fucking _do_ this." 

Brigitte can feel her own smile crawl across her face, a little savage, tilts her head back for Ginger's kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments appreciated.


End file.
